o1 vs Qwen 3
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •o1 is meaningfully stronger at multimodal (60 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Qwen 3 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (90 vs 35).
- •Qwen 3 is open-weights (free to self-host); o1 is paid API only.
- •Qwen 3 has a 128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) context window vs 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| o1 | Qwen 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | Alibaba (Qwen Team) |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) | ✓128K tokens (32K for 0.6B/1.7B/4B dense variants) |
| Input / 1M tokens | $15.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $60.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2024-12 | 2025-04 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | o1 | Qwen 3 |
|---|---|---|
| AIME 2024 | 74% | - |
| GPQA Diamond | 77.3% | - |
| Codeforces | ~89th percentile | - |
| Qwen3-235B-A22B | - | 235B total / 22B active |
| Qwen3-30B-A3B | - | 30B total / 3B active |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose o1 if...
- →Hard, multi-step math, science, and logic problems that reward deliberate reasoning
- →Competitive programming and algorithmic problem solving
- →Existing o1-based pipelines already validated for reasoning tasks
Choose Qwen 3 if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable model with a permissive license
- →You want to toggle deep reasoning on or off per request
- →Multilingual applications
- →Efficient inference via MoE with few active parameters